Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  In Washington, Cronkite had access to the CBS office at the National Press Club. His able assistant Eileen Shanahan, who went on to become a reporter for The New York Times, was tasked with mining daily White House and USDA news releases for valuable radio nuggets that would interest a Great Plains audience. Although Cronkite was good at ad-libbing, he had trouble finishing his reports on time. Working for the UP had been far different from his new job at the Midwest radio syndicate. Timing was now key to his position. It was also essential for him to cultivate Washington insider sources. Using connections first developed at The Daily Texan, Cronkite was able to fall in with the Texas delegation on Capitol Hill. “Walter being Walter, he got to know [Speaker of the House] Sam Rayburn pretty well,” Andy Rooney recalled. “When I saw him in Georgetown one afternoon, he one-upped me by drinking bourbon with Rayburn.”

  While Cronkite was adjusting to the demands of radio, Ed Murrow was facing the challenges of television. He wasn’t happy about being a bifurcated CBS reporter. “I wish television,” he said in 1949, “would go to hell.” Perhaps TV was Satan’s tool, Cronkite felt like telling Murrow, but the medium wasn’t going to be granted an exit visa anytime soon. Radio news had taken twenty years and a world war to learn to take full advantage of its inherent strength. At its best, in the hands of someone like Murrow, radio news had become a public art, a partnership between reporter and the listener. Television, on the other hand, was far from an art form in the late 1940s. Its newscasts looked like filmed radio, resulting in little more than spoken wire reports emitted to the viewer. “The people who say TV will destroy radio are as wrong as those who, twenty-five years ago, said that radio would kill the newspapers,” Murrow told Ben Gross of the New York Daily News. “I sincerely believe that radio news will become more and more important.”

  Even as late as 1949, the potential of television news had yet to be seriously explored. “In the beginning,” said Sig Mickelson, the first director of CBS Television news, “the Murrows, Collingwoods, Sevareids wouldn’t deign to be caught in television. Television was for Howdy Doody and Romper Room. Radio was for adults.” In the early years of television, in fact, producers didn’t even know where to look for the potential. The priority, indeed, was the perfection of the on-air reading. Murrow, along with the producer Fred Friendly, had been doing a radio segment, Hear It Now, that was carried on 173 stations and won Peabody Awards. They were masters at script reading.

  Douglas Edwards of CBS, the original face of TV news, ran his eyes over any script on the desk before him and then looked up into the camera to talk. He was smooth, but the bobbing of his head was regarded as a terrible distraction during his dinner-hour segment, Douglas Edwards with the News. In the truest sense of the word, Edwards was a journalism pioneer. Born in Ada, Oklahoma, in 1917, Edwards began his radio career as a teenager, working as a “junior” announcer at a 100-watt station, before cutting his teeth professionally at WKYZ in Detriot during the Great Depression. He didn’t have much in the way of star power, but he pushed on during a time when television news faced a bias vis-à-vis radio broadcasting. There were two main reasons for this: “First it was television,” Mike Conway explained in The Origins of Television News in America; “second it was news on television.”

  Edwards’s fifteen-minute show on CBS was the only nightly news broadcast in early 1949. Later that year, NBC started its own competing TV news program, with John Cameron Swayze as host. Swayze, whom Cronkite had befriended when both were newspapermen in Kansas City, memorized the scripts for NBC’s nightly Camel News Caravan. In fact, Swayze had made his first TV appearance in 1933 by reading the newspaper out loud at an experimental facility in Kansas City. It was transmitted live from the building’s top floor and beamed into the lobby, where it could be watched on prototype sets. Arriving at NBC’s studios on East 106th Street in Manhattan at about three in the afternoon, the forty-three-year-old Swayze would sift through reports from United Press or NBC radio correspondents. After writing the script for his fifteen-minute show, he would read it out loud three or four times, and with that, commit it to memory. Swayze could ad-lib a bit, but his talent was delivering his program with straight-ahead verve.

  When Swayze immediately captured the larger part of the available audience, CBS executives strongly encouraged Edwards to memorize his scripts. He couldn’t, and he didn’t think it was a good idea anyway. Although Edwards had started as a velvet-voiced announcer, he had struggled to establish credentials as a newsman and he didn’t want to devote too much of his time to learning words by rote.

  The producer of Douglas Edwards with the News was a twenty-six-year-old maverick named Don Hewitt. Energetic, unafraid, and insistent, Hewitt, a native New Yorker, wasn’t comfortable until he had his way. A former photo editor for Acme Newspictures, he had joined CBS in 1949, and worked on Douglas Edwards with the News since its conception. If Hewitt had a pet peeve, it was Edwards’s on-air stiffness. Hell, he used to carp, Woodrow Wilson had been looser than Edwards. Long before the term telegenic was in vogue, Hewitt intuited that it was the key to a successful TV broadcasting career. Determined to loosen his guy up, Hewitt looked for a way to get Edwards to stop looking down at his script, even suggesting that he learn Braille. Based in New York, Hewitt and his CBS team experimented with cue cards and then settled on writing the script in large letters on a scroll, which turned just above the camera.

  While Edwards and Hewitt were trying to jump-start CBS television in New York, Cronkite was in Washington, wondering whether he had dead-ended on KMBC radio. He missed the United Press. Few of the Midwest affiliate stations were properly using his reports from Washington. “Most of the news directors back at the local stations,” Cronkite recalled, “didn’t know how to query me for information.”

  When the Korean War erupted in the summer of 1950, Cronkite itched to cover the action. It saddened him to read UP stories from Asia by colleagues while he was stuck reciting wheat and soybean prices over the radio for a localized Midwest syndicate. With Betsy’s okay, he wired Wells Church, the CBS news manager in New York, to volunteer his reportorial services in the Korean conflict. To Cronkite’s surprise, he got a call from Edward R. Murrow instead of Church. “Ed said that not many guys get a second chance, but would you like to join CBS and go to Korea?” Cronkite recalled. “I said, you’re darn right yes.” Murrow green-lighted the hiring of Cronkite. He buried whatever residual animosity existed as a hangover from the Savile Club incident, when Cronkite had accepted, then reneged on, a CBS News job offer.

  The cold war conflict started on June 25, 1950, when ninety thousand North Korean troops invaded South Korea. UP was the first news service to break the story. Before long, terms such as limited war and military engagement were bandied about as if the world were playing semantic roulette. The Korean confrontation played out not only in defined battles but also in a nameless kind of jousting at flash points in the spartan hills and mountains of the Korean Peninsula. Cronkite was bored with his KMBC job, though he did want to stay in radio. Cronkite believed he was good in the medium, but his midwestern syndicate didn’t offer the opportunity to become better. That July, in his Atchison Daily Globe column, Jim Carson reported about Cronkite’s doings, saying the “KMBC-KFRM Washington Correspondent has taken an indefinite leave of absence, and has joined the Columbia Broadcasting System Washington News staff. Cronkite, a former United Press War Correspondent, is subject to re-assignment at any time, and possibly will be sent overseas for the network.”

  What Carson failed to report was that Cronkite had ironed out a deal with Murrow wherein his Korean War reports would get aired first on KMBC; only then could other CBS affiliates air them. Betsy was pregnant with Kathy, the Cronkites’ second child, and while Walter’s going to Korea would indeed be risky, it also meant more money for the expanding family. Cronkite rationalized that Korea would be a short war, but the resulting exposure from reporting at the 38th parallel would launch his car
eer as a major league CBS broadcaster. Cronkite’s first task at CBS was to familiarize himself with Korean War minutiae. As he awaited posting to Asia, two days after getting vaccinated, his job situation suddenly changed.

  CBS had acquired a local TV affiliate in Washington, D.C., from the FCC, and Cronkite was asked by Dr. Frank Stanton to broadcast a daily briefing on the Korean War on WTOP-TV. Stanton served as president of CBS between 1946 and 1971. A native of Michigan, he attended high school in Dayton, Ohio, and went on to earn a degree at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio. Bookish, aloof, but not without humor, he earned his PhD in psychology at the Ohio State University in 1935. Stern and demanding, excellent at running with intellectual hounds, Stanton joined the CBS news division as its big brain. During World War II, he worked with the Office of War Information, regularly offering propaganda advice for the armed forces while serving as vice president of CBS. Generals and admirals never intimidated Stanton. Neither did lawyers. His steely schoolmaster resolve even made Bill Paley obedient. While Paley received all the kudos and big dollars for founding CBS, Stanton was the provost type, keeping things afloat, insisting that television indeed had a public affairs responsibility.

  It was Stanton who gave Cronkite his crack at television news. The WTOP-TV news studios were located in residential northwest Washington, at Fortieth and Brandywine streets. Nothing about the operation—run by Ted Koop, head of the CBS Washington bureau—was fancy. But the network’s TV operations were growing. “CBS asked me to go on the air and do the Korean War story, which was the big story at the time,” Cronkite later recalled in a Detroit News Magazine profile. “They simply said, ‘Go out and do five minutes on the evening news.’ They asked what I needed, and I said, ‘Just give me a blackboard with an outline of Korea with the 38th parallel marked on it.’ ”

  Originally Cronkite hosted WTOP-TV’s fifteen-minute late Sunday newscast Up to the Minute (which followed What’s My Line? at 11:00 p.m. EST). On air, he drew arrows on the map to highlight troop movements on the Korean Peninsula. Washingtonians took notice. Cronkite might have had no experience on TV, but he was the ablest newsman CBS had available for duty. Cronkite excelled. Koop then asked him to take over the entire fifteen-minute 6:00 p.m. television newscast. “I said sure,” Cronkite recalled, “because this was all fun and experimental stuff. We were still trying to figure out how to do news on television.”

  Cronkite, now thirty-three years old, soon exhibited the mysterious quality that Hewitt had called “telegenic” appeal. Others called it “camera charisma” or “star quality.” The baffling art of connecting with an audience had long been studied in the theater (and more recently in film schools). But the only reliable conclusion, the great scholars decided, was that some folks had star quality and others flat-out didn’t. In television, the on-air performer was in effect being invited into the viewer’s home (at a distance equivalent to that of actual guests in living rooms). These visits were almost endlessly repetitive: a theatergoer might see the magnetic Richard Burton once a year on Broadway or the charismatic Edward G. Robinson at the movies twice a year, but Cronkite was going to be on five nights a week.

  On September 15, 1950, the day of the Inchon landings, Walter and Betsy’s second daughter, Mary Kathleen (“Kathy”) Cronkite, was born. It no longer made sense for Cronkite, the father of two children, to become a foreign correspondent in Korea. Living in Truman’s Washington, doing television, was the ideal billet for him. What really impressed Bill Paley and Dr. Frank Stanton in New York was that Cronkite even attracted a commercial sponsor: Hechinger, a local lumber and hardware company. So quickly did Cronkite establish himself as CBS’s premier television newscaster that by Election Night that November of 1950, his was the only name CBS would promote in its television coverage. All the top CBS journalists—including Edward R. Murrow, Bill Downs, Eric Sevareid, Joe Wershba, Bill Shadel, Griffin Bancroft, and Alexander Kendrick—were working in radio. Although Cronkite’s audience at WTOP-TV was local, his broadcast career had taken off, due to the twitching little box. Stanton advised Cronkite to stick with TV news, for it was soon to be a booming industry.

  Working with Cronkite at the Washington station was Bill Shadel, a correspondent during World War II for American Rifleman, the NRA house organ. Shadel was impressed by Cronkite’s Steady Eddy appearance and ability to ad-lib on TV as if he were born for the job. “Within six months he was the talk of the town,” Shadel recalled of Cronkite. “He seemed to be the first to sense the necessary techniques for this new medium. His voice immediately was the voice of authority. His presence filled the screen. He realized that his audience was that camera and he chose to address that camera despite his script.”

  The TV studio at WTOP was very small, not much bigger than a mansion closet. Cronkite was to begin the broadcast delivering the headline news and then introduce Joe Wershba, who would interview in the studio someone who was profiled in that day’s edition of The Washington Post. At the back end of the fifteen-minute broadcast was a sports and business roundup. It was all live. Cronkite didn’t even have a script, just index cards that he studied before going on air. “How do you do the news so perfectly without a script?” Wershba’s wife, Shirley, once asked Cronkite. “Nobody understands.” Cronkite replied. “Every day at U.P. an editor would call me into his office and say ‘What is the news today?’ I’d have to tick all of the stories off in a precise and condensed way. That’s all I’m doing at WTOP.”

  Cronkite did something else that was novel beyond covering the Korean War: he used charts, diagrams, and maps as props for other news stories. Sometimes he would even hold up photographs of the person he was talking about, things you couldn’t use on radio. Cronkite and Shadel became pioneers in TV news and close friends. “[Shadel] came every Wednesday night to sit beside me and I put the broadcast together at a desk in the basement of the station,” Cronkite recalled in 2000. “By one of those strange coincidences, the Hecht Department Store on Wednesday night did an on-air fashion show (perhaps the nation’s first) immediately preceding the news. The models performed their rapid changes of costume behind a makeshift canvas curtain a few feet from my desk. Sometimes the view was, well, distracting.”

  Cronkite’s performance covering the 1950 midterm elections drew accolades from Dr. Stanton in New York, not because he was so dynamic but because he didn’t screw up and satisfied his two commercial sponsors: Esso at 6:00 p.m. and Hechinger at 11:00 p.m. While the Murrow Boys looked down on TV and dismissed Cronkite as not good enough for radio, his career had caught fire. Joe Wershba, a colleague at CBS, tried to counteract that perception by writing a piece for The Washington Post praising Cronkite’s prowess in the hot new medium of television. “Walter Winchell drops a line to the effect that television news reporters really read their lines off the cameras—and that’s why they look and sound so smooth,” Wershba said. “Walter is being unfair to CBS’s own Walter—Walter Cronkite. Cronkite . . . works all day on his television news report, uses the old college instructor’s technique of a few notes, and talks the news right at his audience. He does it so smoothly, people won’t believe he isn’t reading it ‘off the camera.’ No sense explaining it here: people still won’t believe it. We who work with Cronkite can hardly believe it either.”

  Besides hosting the national Sunday-evening newscast of Up to the Minute, every Sunday afternoon he served as co-host of the WTOP-TV show The Week’s News (with the chief of Newsweek’s Washington bureau, Ernest K. Lindley). The public affairs program started with heavy news and ended with a soft feature piece. On June 24, 1951, for instance, Cronkite and Lindley aired new combat footage from the Korean War, followed by a discussion of nuclear weapons with Congressman Felix Edward Hébert and a “pretty golfers” segment featuring Patty Berg and Babe Didrikson.

  There was another ingredient to Cronkite’s TV magic: he had an innate understanding of the medium. The fact that he didn’t even own a TV until his first broadc
ast made him something of a prodigy. No one at WTOP told him how to shape a broadcast, and while Edwards was a model for many new TV newsmen, Cronkite had his own ideas from the start. “I had a gut feeling that television news delivery ought to be as informal as possible,” he explained in his memoir. “I imagined the newspaper editor running down a list of the day’s big stories when asked at home: ‘What happened today?’ ” Handed his own fifteen minutes of airtime for the news, Cronkite remained relaxed, determined to play the straight man. In fact, he outdid John Cameron Swayze in the unflappable department. Whereas Swayze memorized his script, Cronkite never had one: he memorized the content, from the broad issues to the pertinent facts. “I went on and I did the news,” he recalled. “I ad-libbed it.”

  Cronkite’s UP training of boiling down the essence of a story in bites served him well in TV news. He labored for accuracy and clarity, but not necessarily bright originality, memorable phrasing, nuance, or implication. Unlike most fine writers, he wasn’t in love with his own words. Hence, he didn’t feel compelled to memorize them. Abbreviation of complex issues came naturally to him. The extemporaneous newscast was no compromise for Cronkite; he could achieve the same accuracy and clarity without the perfect wording.

  By contrast, Edward R. Murrow worked hard on his scripts, weighing the phrases like a jeweler. Murrow was always keyed up before a TV broadcast, as nervous as a newcomer. Even though he typically read every word off his script, he was still physically uncomfortable on the air. He smoked continuously to calm his nerves while he was in the studio, sweating profusely and often twisting his hands around under the table. Well aware that he would make a rather pathetic sight if he were filmed on a bad day, Murrow shied away from television, publicly criticizing it, yet making just enough appearances to convince himself and others that he could master the medium if and when he wanted.